Critical Review by Charles Perry

In the following review, Perry criticizes the themes, characterization, and style of Sailor Song.

Eighteen years ago, I was Ken Kesey's interpreter/guide on an expedition to the Great Pyramid. When we weren't poking around for mysteries in the Egyptian sands, I was hoping he'd tell stories about his Acid Test days in 1965 and 1966. Kesey, though, wanted to discuss Proust and Hemingway and Turgenev.

Big surprise. Of all the people who talked about the Death of the Novel in the '60s, he had seemed most in earnest. After all, this was the guy who'd written One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. It meant something when a genuine major novelist declared he'd given up writing in favor of...